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TW: Talks of grief, depression, implied mental health issues, and thoughts of suicide (yeah, pretty heavy stuff but I promise they aren’t overt and it gets hopeful in the end!).
A Perfect World
In a perfect world,
This could never happen.
In a perfect world,
You'd still be here.
And it makes no sense,
I could just pick up the pieces—
“Perfect World,” by Simple Plan
***
Emon Krers, fifteen years old, survivor of the Mandalorian Great Purge and half-awake, noticed that the world was undulating all around him.
Or he thought it was.
“WAKEY, WAKEY, KRERS!!” came tittering, derisive voices hollering from outside his tent, and Emon shot up from bed and looked around him indignantly.
Dank farrik, they were at it again! What time was it? What the hell? It’s morning already?
The tent continued to violently sway and wobble.
“EARTHQUAKE!!!” yelled one of the other boys outside shrilly, in apparent teasing towards the sleeping boy within, presently shaken to wakefulness like the whole structure that surrounded him. The boy hurriedly got dressed, his ears crimson and face fuming.
It’s the Clan Herron and Clan Masyll kids again, fooling around, grabbing tent pegs and steel frames wherever they could hold onto, and giving the makeshift shelter a tremendous shake before blasting away in wicked laughter and boisterous hooting.
They did that to all the kids in tents that slept in, way past the breakfast call time which was 5 o’ clock in the kriffing dawn. Emon Krers shared the tent with his older brother, Drali, but Drali, with his infuriatingly measured self-discipline, would be up half an hour before call time and do drills with the older Mandalorian youths. Drali Krers was twenty-three years old. The siblings had quite the age gap; while it hadn’t really been a factor which estranged the brothers from each other, it had grown into one, nowadays.
Emon had begun to wonder if he even cared. Everything slowly weighed down on him, more than he could ever admit, and it was pressing him into a thin little wafer; he was getting very exhausted.
“STOP IT, YOU KRIFFIN’ MORONS!!” Emon bellowed, his voice cracking furiously as he sped out of his tent and was immediately met with a cloud of dust which painfully grazed his bare face.
The culprits had long bolted off, perhaps to terrorize the next bunch of slumbering kids—at the verge of falling off their assigned routine, a vain attempt to ensure that every individual on the encampment had their own set of responsibilities.
Emon tried a manner of pursuit in search for the Clan Herron kids, who usually lingered to further taunt him. They were nowhere to be found, but as he frenetically turned to another corner, he was met with his brother’s towering form.
“Hey!” growled Emon as Drali held him fast on one shoulder before he could bodily slam onto him—the clumsy little oaf he was.
Drali appeared to have been standing there all this time with the sole purpose of confronting Emon once the boy had been coaxed out of their personal quarters.
“Em,” said Drali stonily. The young man was trying to hide an ever-deepening frustration. “It’s almost eight o’ clock and breakfast’s been cleared! What the hell have you been staying up late again for?”
“Get off me, Dral!” Emon huffed, untangling himself from the older youth’s grip. “You know I can’t sleep. It’a always been like that since forever!”
“You should’ve taken that tonic Erissa made for you.”
“It tastes like vomit. And no, I don’t like taking it. It makes me kinda numb the next day.”
Drali sighed, painfully, as though a part of him was bruised. The young man shook his head in defeat laced with his own obstinate nature. “As per usual, since you missed breakfast, you’re not having any. At least have a ration bar.”
Drali handed him a packet.
It was actually forbidden to let “rulebreakers” off the hook—if you missed breakfast, you waited until lunch time (two o’ clock in Concord Dawn standard day), but until then, you suffer in silence with an empty stomach and fall faint from hunger and self-resentment.
Emon wordlessly took it, his eyes not meeting Drali’s.
“Okay, whatever. Thanks.”
“Em,” called Drali.
Oh no. That tone again.
“What?” Emon still couldn’t meet his brother’s gaze.
“Check your datapad for today’s duties. Please don’t miss the modules…”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m not the one who’s been slacking. There are tons of kids from other Clans who probably need that stupid lecture more than I do—“
“Em, I’m not talking to you as some kind of wrangler. I’m talking to you as a brother…”
Emon felt his heart quiver a little. Drali was much better with his emotions than Emon could ever be. It made Emon immensely uncomfortable when Drali would assert his role as older brother, but oftentimes, Drali would go over and beyond that.
As much as he tried, Drali can never fill their dead parents’ shoes.
“Sure,” Emon said casually, letting up a bit, cutting Drali some slack. Drali wasn’t a bad brother. If any, Emon was the useless git.
“See you around,” said Drali, and Emon walked off without another word, unable to fully square up with Drali head-on. It would mean opening a huge part of his heart which Emon had carefully guarded, and once he did, he knew that Drali wouldn’t be enough to help him bounce back. Drali himself had his own worries, own burdens—perhaps even greater than Emon’s, and Emon could just not bother. He had all the excuses in the world.
When he knew that he placed a good distance between himself and Drali, Emon looked up to survey the world before him. He absently opened the ration bar packet, picked out a morsel and bit into it. It tasted like fire cake in his throat, and Emon perseveringly let it linger in his mouth.
It had been close to three years since the lot of them were ferried to the third moon of Concord Dawn—and it had been over five years since the tragedy that took all normality away. If there ever had been such a thing, anyway. Mandalorians, as the rest of the galaxy had perceived them, hardly lived normal lives.
And yet here they were, hundreds of orphans of parents either killed in action or missing, perhaps never to be found again; parents who had fully devoted the last moments of their lives to the evacuation of their children before surrendering themselves heart and soul to the furnace of fate, when they took on the bombs and blaster-fire of the enemy.
Their fallen parents have joined the Manda, the Oversoul—among the stars and the ether, to an afterlife, perhaps, where they could no longer physically look upon the suffering of their own foundlings and offspring: the current generation floundering in the cusp of oblivion, almost devoid of purpose.
Emon had heard whispers and clandestine plans to reclaim Mandalore, and this had him and everyone else in soundless clamor. They had a sovereign named Lady Bo-Katan Kryze who was supposedly in charge of all operations, but there was something about her which Emon thought lacked thorough dedication. In the times he had seen her, fully-armored and even helmeted with her lieutenants, she walked with a gait as aimless as someone who had lost a good amount of equilibrium—
—very much like the kids who crept into their tents most days, with nights hardly entertained by limited HoloNet games and campfire stories which rapidly lost their charm.
It unsettled Emon greatly, but he daren’t speak out against a sovereign. They had their own world, and he had his—and the rest of the kids’, who avoided everyone at large, save for their own company.
Emon called them “kids,” as he himself was: not yet fully an adult, even if by standards of the traditional ceremony called the verd’goten, he and many more others were already deemed of age—meaning that they were spiritually an adult. However, the contrary hit them when they were told that it was simply a formality.
“Kids” were the ones aged—well, he supposed the babies, all the way to the seventeen-year-olds, even the eighteen-year-olds who were already being trained with heavier drills away from general sight and traffic. The drills were bundled into “at your own pace” modules, and while there were those that took these modules seriously, there were many that seemingly cared less.
That was the overall atmosphere of the encampment.
Here, they were concealed under the veil of a steadily streaming “force-field” which shielded the moon from any insidious outside frequencies and their inner activity.
It was the shield that kept them hidden, unknown, safe.
In fact, Emon himself had seen the generators which projected these shields. It was very well within his ability to tinker and tweak at it, but Lieutenant Axe Woves, one of the more kindly officers under Lady Kryze, had strictly ordered him away a clear margin of it.
Emon still chewed on the same piece he had bit on earlier, quickly losing his appetite. He wasn’t in his best physical form; in fact, he was small for his age and was reed-thin, which worried Drali time and again, even if there were times Emon would scarf down dinner as though rabid massiffs were having at it.
His slight built, however, was proportional to his features, so to speak: his disheveled dark hair always flew in stray cowlicks, with his large dark eyes that seemed perpetually inquisitive—there was a haunting, endearingly cherubic look to Emon. Drali had joked once, blandly, that Emon could be a poster boy of helplessness and innocence that usually pleaded donations out of unsuspecting souls.
Emon frowned.
He threw away the empty ration pack and stopped by the ‘fresher; like an automaton, Emon washed his face and brushed his teeth with the sonic. He pondered about a full sonic shower but had left his cleaner things back at the tent, when he had been too preoccupied fending off the flesh-and-blood poltergeists.
A small beep met his naked ears. In days like these, they hardly bothered whether they wore helmets or not. Perhaps when they did target practice, or when they found enough mandokar in themselves to follow through the drill modules with the needed intensity that branded them as warriors.
It was his datapad which heralded a message from the upper echelon—maybe Alor’ad Graz Woric, the grumpy middle-aged captain who cooked their meals but suffered from a bout of control issues. The man was rather insufferable, which Emon knew bordered to a sort of obssessive-compulsive syndrome. Captain Woric labeled every damn thing he thought needed labeling, as though everyone in the camp were dumb and blind and stupid: So here’s the ARMORY (still quite empty), the MESS HALL, the BUFFET (only get what you can eat or suffer the consquences, you brutes and brats), the TRAINING HALL (small and dilapidated) and the ever notorious OFF-LIMITS signs which were ubiquitously close to the officers’ side of the encampment, as well as the structures that held equipment which required special permission to access.
Emon read his datapad, which he fished from a leather pack strapped to his utility belt:
Organize module tents - fifty racks
Shine boots - ten racks
Clean blasters - ask assistance; twelve racks
Module-075 review (Mandalorian Educational Code required of youths aged 13 to 16)
…blah blah blah… Emon skimmed at each bulletted responsibilty tonelessly in his head.
The boy swiftly shook his head, as if to clear heady particles of a bad dream.
Module tents would be that-a-way.
Emon trudged to it, as listless as a lifeless kite.
His eyes stung, and he wasn’t sure if it was the mid-morning heat creeping into the spaces of his exposed skin.
The module tents supposedly required special access, but this time, all he did was to swipe a code from his datapad to effortlessly open the cheaply-made durasteel door. Anyone with a weight above two hundred pounds (a few of the older youths were built heavily) would be able to crush the door with their bare hands.
They seemed to be living on scraps.
“OH FOR KRIFF’S SAKE—“ Emon groaned when he was met with a sight of piles upon piles of disorganized module datasticks, spilling from their assigned containers, which had spilled from their assigned racks in turn.
Whoever had been last in charge of the modules had simply draped everything so haphazardly, as if they chucked in a handful into the tent like a hundred pebbles. He swore that he imagined the kids from Clan Herron—those damn miscreants—stifling laugher as they bulldozed the tent in with half-finished modules before running off once more to inflict further mischief upon hapless souls.
Those kids should be punished and placed under strict disciplinary action.
Captain Woric had gotten hold of it once, but never again.
It seemed as though even someone as iron-fisted as the Alor’ad was beginning to bear very little authority over the young and restless (but visibly very disheartened) populace.
The adults were surely losing their hold on the keen yet disgruntled minds of the encampment’s wild and covertly frantic youthful energies.
Emon grumbled as he gathered an armload of datasticks, placed them in the center table for organizing by subject, by difficulty, by serial number, etc, and so on and so forth. He just needed to fix the arrangement up a little, and not be the kriffing archivist.
To everyone’s credit, there hadn’t been movements of outward anarchy, despite having no parents, no solid figures of authority, no proper guidance, not even formal combat training and school for the older teenagers. They were mostly left to their own devices as day in and day out they awaited word and action, of which the latest had been exciting enough—and none followed after.
That was when Lieutenant Woves flew in with an entire Gozanti-class freighter, which had been reportedly hijacked from the enemy. There were newly-manufactured weapons and munitions in it, which Emon recognized were of Imperial-make—but he did recognize some subtle designs which were Mandalorian in nature, back then when MandalTech still did trade with everyone in the galaxy. That was a damn long time ago.
Two weeks had since passed. The thrill of this discovery died down, and it was back to the lull and buzz of an everyday vacuum.
The lamps which hung from either side of the tent flickered a little as Emon sorted out the modules by difficulty level. He himself and his (fair-weather) friends Oryn Kadoss and Thava Syng were in basic intermediate, which sounded like an oxymoron, but simply meant that they already had trained in some level with the blaster and the jetpack.
(His jetpack needed maintenance, he reminded himself.)
Emon let the task swallow him whole, letting his senses fall into the drudgery, and his vision blurred as he fell into the recesses of deep thought. He suddenly felt hot all over, and before he knew it, he had ceased all activity and just stood there by the table, unable to move another muscle.
Kriff this.
Just kriff all of this.
I hate it here.
By this time, if things never happened as they had, Da would’ve taken him off-world as he was nearing his sixteenth birthday. They’d probably take a trip to one of the Core Worlds for the heck of it all, to further vex his mother, and to even make Drali simmer with a healthy dose of jealousy in the manner siblings usually did. Da would probably begin taking him to MandalMotors laboratories more often, as Emon had wished to become an engineer like his folks. Da was a ship designer. Mum tested a thousand ship parts everyday for soundness and modifications. Drali was eighteen when the Purge happened, but he was already set for University, deciding to major in Business Management or something similar.
Emon himself had been accelerated, but with extra care. Mum said he shouldn’t be far removed from class with kids his age, but Emon thought that never really mattered, whether he fell in step with students his age or not. He had lived in his own world ever since he could perceive reality. Unhealthy coping mechanisms, said Mum, and Da would brush her off. Maladaptive daydreaming was the term he heard often in hushed tones at the table when his parents thought they were alone. It was pretty common, he further gathered, among children of Emon’s calibre.
The mundane could not anchor him to his own feet.
Yet he shared something painfully common with the rest of the kids:
They wanted to go home.
Back to Mandalore. To Manda’yaim. To Home of the Soul.
…and to Concordia, to Krownest, to Kalevala, to Phindar… from wherever they had been displaced.
They still had no idea how, or when, or whichever tactics which needed to be spawned and polished to reach the ultimate goal.
Emon felt his strength of spirit sap from him, and he fell backwards to sit on his haunches, letting the task lay unfinished before him for as long as he ruminated.
Chaotic order. Orderly chaos. Every sane mind being eaten out by the threat of nihilistic tendencies. Laziness was a sin in Mandalorian culture. Yet there was little force pushing their wills forward.
Drali was one of those with the initiative to shepherd the younger ones every now and then, along with some others, like Drali’s childhood pal, Van Shu’ad. He and Oryn snickered heartily like loth-kittens when they had labeled Drali the head of the “Mandalorian Troubled Youth Rehabilitation Association” and that they were the youth leaders who spouted scripted pep talks and empty promises to less discerning minds. The joke got old quickly when they realized the situation was far graver than any of them surmised.
Sometimes kids would go missing but they always returned, chastened and chastised on their own accord. More kids and crippled families from other parts of the galaxy flew in, as Clans were very cautiously informed of their encampment and trickled towards them in weeks at a time. Small-scale quarrels among Clans who still held age-old grudges would initially erupt, but even those heated spats and near-fisticuffs died out after a while.
Emon knew they no longer found meaning in perpetuating these so-called deep-seated Clan feuds. Kids talked about it in school—of the elders wringing their hands late at night, buire raising voices which scandalized the neighbors in the wee hours, bringing up how this Clan and that continuously refused to pay a century’s old debt, or disputed inheritances didn’t pull through, or forbidden marriages took place (what?), and there were the more serious ones that hinted at theft and attempted murder—all which, in their much younger minds, seemed empty and even petty.
They seemed even pettier now.
Once, in the less turbulent moments when Drali’s presence didn’t leave Emon’s defenses up, the brothers discussed the despondent stirrings of some among the encampment.
“The lads at the armory have been talking about falling off cliffs without a jetpack, if you know what I mean,” Drali said very solemnly.
Concord Dawn’s third moon possessed a strangely colored atmosphere, domed by a gauze of purple and citrine sky that shone upon near-barren valleys and canyons of sparse vegetation.
Emon scoffed openly. “No one’s killed themselves yet, right?”
Drali frowned. “Emon,” said the youth warningly.
“What?” Emon huffed. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s a serious matter. But we’re all holding on, right? It would be… dishonorable, otherwise.”
They were all within their tents at this dark hour, lights out, and the entire moon was quiet and slumbering. The night within their quarters was filled with the quiet conversation of the two brothers who slept on cots at opposite sides.
“Yes, it would be dishonorable,” stated Drali, in a strange monotone which Emon found… heartbreaking.
Their parents didn’t leave this world so that their children would be careless about their precious gift of survival.
Their sacrifice was worth more all their children’s weight in beskar, even as they were bereft of the valuable Mandalorian iron. Who cares about beskar when there were no longer any warm bodies to carry on the legacy?
Emon had then begun to cry.
Sometimes he cried, and he knew Drali cried, despite being pretty much an adult already himself.
He knew that the other kids cried, and they had all kept it among themselves, within themselves.
They were Mandalorians, supposedly hardened to trials and tribulation, Mandokarla and all that drabble—steadfastness, courage, the unbreakable spine to take what the world threw at them from all angles…
To hell with it.
They were orphaned children.
The Mando’ade had been reduced to a heap of motherless, fatherless, directionless kids, along with a few disillusioned adults, making their way to hopefully somewhere—and still ended up with nowhere.
This was a bludgeoningly far cry from the perfect world they wished they all had, more than five years ago, even as the Empire still held sway over their planet… at least, Emon and Drali still had their parents. At least the thousands, the million other kids had theirs.
Whatever Lady Kryze had in mind, or Lieutenant Woves… Emon had failed to fall privy to any of those plans, even as he had means to eavesdrop and gather information through dubious yet necessary means.
He had finally lost the resolve.
Emon just sat there, his presence of mind once more returning to that dry and hot mid-morning within the modules tent, certain that the boots and the blasters can wait, now that there was little left to see on the horizon.
***
A week after, Emon found more time to rewire bits of his helmet. He had somewhat a line of “clientele” in need of his services. He had somehow become one of the go-to guys for electrical maintenance of their helmets and beskar’gam.
Everyone paid in… cookies. It was strange, it was funny, and it was a secret shared among the kids. They weren’t supposed to have a stash of sweets for ready consumption near their person, as it encouraged further unhealthy eating, which led to long periods of sluggishness. Not very good for building a future army… if that was even happening at this wretched point.
“Hey, Krers!”
Oryn’s bright yet pressing voice met his ears, and Emon looked up, hardly noticing that the other boy had lifted his quarters’ tent flap and had casually strolled in.
“Yeah, what?” returned Emon, without missing a beat with the wiring he held close together.
Oryn Kadoss, seventeen years old, tan skin, hazel eyes, and inches taller than Emon, smiled cheekily and threw his helmet at Emon; the latter yelped and caught his friend’s buy’ce just in time, but in consequence, dropped his current work.
“What the KRIFF, Oryn—!”
“I need you to fix the left optics, ‘coz they’re a bit loose, and oh yeah—you’re coming with us,” said Oryn in his own spritely hurriedness.
Emon knew his jaw figuratively dropped, as evidenced by Oryn’s guffaw at his friend’s expression.
“What’s going on? Is there war?”
Oryn made a funny noise through his lips. “Nope. Don’t even wish it, in the state we’re in. Lady Kryze is coming in with a—wait for it—“
“Uh-huh…” grumbled Emon with vain attempts to sound unamused.
“—A Class 546 Light Cruiser…“
This was when Emon finally grabbed Oryn’s helmet to get to its immediate repairs with a refreshing urgency. “Well, so what are we waiting for? We’re gonna escort Lady Kryze from the airfield?”
“Yep. Says… says we got a new recruit with her and Koska Reeves,” Oryn went on.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yup. Some outsider, I heard. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”
“Outsider? What the hell’s that supposed to mean? The new recruit isn’t Mandalorian or something?”
Oryn paused thoughtfully. “Well, they’re Mandalorian, but… of another sect, I heard. Have you gotten an ear about the sect called the Children of the Watch?”
Emon jolted and wiggled around the creases of his memory—any past lessons as a child, or history chunks from Da’s rambling…
“Osik,” Emon whispered. “They’re from that… cult?”
“It’s a he,” Oryn further informed his friend. “A grown-up, and… guess what? Clad in pure beskar.”
“Well, damn!” Emon whispered. “Are all in his cult like that?”
Oryn shrugged non-comittally. “Not sure. Just got the info from Van. Lieutenant Woves was kinda tight-lipped about it. I’m sure he’s another survivor. But… these Children of the Watch Mandalorians, they’re pretty hardcore, like keeping their helmet on forever after swearing a creed. Not sure again if he’ll fit in… I mean, have you ever met anyone from a cult?”
Emon shook his head. “Can’t say I have, Oryn.”
“Me neither. Now is that damn helmet ready?”
Oryn Kadoss was met with a square punch on the face, committed by none other than the butt of his repaired buy’ce as Emon flung it back at the ingrate.
*
Emon had cleanly forgotten about his birthday, which would occur in a couple of days.
He would be turning sixteen, and it would be another uneventful birthday. Perhaps Drali wouldn’t even remember and leave him alone. Emon rather preferred it that way. Sometimes, he wished that he’d forget his own birthday. Mum and Da were no longer around to celebrate it, anyway. A lot of things had lost their value overtime. Besides, Da would’ve wanted to bring him to a planet where they could have had some quality father-son time—and that will never, ever happen anymore.
Emon’s knees began to stiffen a little as he, along with a small squad—helmeted and armored, assigned two blasters each—waited along with Ver’alor Axe Woves. The older man had decided to keep his helmet on until the last minute, when Lady Kryze’s arrival had been announced through the comms. It was Erissa Lyl, eighteen years of age, and her voice gurgled as if it rattled out of a tin can.
And from the comms once more, he heard whispers of muted awe and suppressed wonder, some of which were his own as the leviathan of a light cruiser eased its bulk onto the vast airfield, some miles away from the encampment.
“Quiet,” Axe Woves ordered, not ungently, through the comms.
The whispers continued, and the Ver’alor, perhaps with his own brand of compassion, let them be; he loosened his own orders for this one time.
When the ramp glided down, Emon at once felt tension hit him like the hard blow of a heavy training balloon upon his gut.
He swallowed thickly.
So… was this tension the fault of the outsider/newcomer/Child of the Watch Mandalorian?
Yes, there was tension.
And there was intrigue.
Apparently, this Child of the Watch Mandalorian was their new Mand’alor, and the squad had broken formation for a split second as they all lightly turned their heads, small movements of quaking excitement upon the words which Koska Reeves let loose from her tongue in contained dismay.
But Emon found a peaceful part of him to single out the presence of the newcomer, who came in step with Lady Kryze.
Gooseflesh filled his arms, prickling underneath his flight suit.
The “outsider” Mandalorian was but a simple man—but there was something, something very peculiar indeed about him at once, and Emon just had to know. He just had to figure this man out.
Oryn had mentioned that this man’s supposed cult had always kept their helmets on, by hook or by crook, until their last breath.
Yet the outsider Mandalorian which stood placidly before them had his face exposed for all of those present to decipher.
Emon had a skill, something he worked on as a small child—reading micro-expressions, even though he felt that part of that skill was myth more than fact. He knew his intuition was seldom wrong, especially since he had a knack of untethering himself from the clutches of boxed reality, and exploring many possibilities in his own.
When he sneakily calibrated his rangefinder so that it focused more closely on the man’s face, that was when Emon stopped all suspicions in their tracks.
He just could not explain it—perhaps, he never will. It could be a story he could tell the smaller kids, if the days to follow would allow…
But this outsider, this cultist, this stranger which had filled their squad with hissing gossip at the last minute, much to Emon’s chagrin—
His eyes were kind—very kind. They were achingly sad that it felt like a punch to Emon’s insides. There was a ridiculous vulnerability to him, yet Emon could very much perceive with the Mandalorian’s stance and manner in which he carried himself, that he was a seasoned warrior.
It’s him, Emon thought, with his usually unbidden pieces of thought and supposition.
He can help us.
This newcomer could be the answer to pave their way back to a perfect world—somehow, in some way, in many ways known and still unknown…
And Emon would very much wanted to be a part of it.
Suddenly, Emon Krers knew where to go, and the maze in his spirit melted away.
When the Mandalorian had to take momentarily leave to tie some loose ends on a planet called Nevarro, Lieutenant Woves relented and ordered the squad to move out and fulfill what they had been sent here to do—escort Lady Kryze and Koska Reeves back to the encampment.
Emon had to linger a little.
The Mandalorian was looking at him, and Emon thought time had stood still; the boy held out his hand, and with all his heart, issued a salute at the strange-yet-not-so-strange man.
Those kind eyes softened once more before the Mandalorian turned away and his tall form receded back into the gangplank.
This was their Mand’alor.
***